Wordorigins.org

undermine, mine

Dave Wilton, Sunday, June 29, 2014

To undermine something is to destroy it through some surreptitious means, to subvert it, and undermine is one of those words whose etymology is readily apparent by examining its constituent elements, under + mine, a reference to the military tactic of digging under the walls of a fortification in order to collapse them. But the word is first recorded in its figurative sense in the South English Legendary, a medieval collection of saint’s lives. The manuscript in which it appears was copied prior to 1325 and the particular version was written around 1280:

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